Rob felt a surge of relief at the confidence in Pettigrew’s voice.
“There is also this matter of your friend Tim.” Pettigrew paused and seemed to consider how he should say what was on his mind. “You don’t sound convinced that he had anything to do with the attacks on the bank.”
“I’m not. But it had to be someone I work with, so when I started hearing all this stuff about Tim, it really made me stop and think.”
“And what do you propose we do about it?”
“I was hoping you could tell me.”
Pettigrew tapped his pen on the legal pad and gazed thoughtfully at Rob.
“The obvious thing,” Pettigrew said, “would be to mention to Agent Steeves that we have suspicions about your friend. The problem, though, is that all you have is suspicion and innuendo.”
“I tried to find Tim this morning but he wasn’t home.”
“Steeves has undoubtedly already interviewed Tim. I doubt your information will be enough to convince him to do anything more.”
“But it’s not just me,” Rob said. “Kirsten could tell Steeves what Tim said to her.”
“Which would prove nothing. He made some angry comment while they were in the midst of breaking up. That’s hardly a smoking gun, is it?”
A bleak, wintry feeling settled over Rob. He took another sip of water, a bigger one this time. There didn’t seem to be anything else worth doing.
Lesley swayed to the left in unison with the other dozen or so passengers as the subway car jolted and rumbled its way downtown. Three Oriental girls in their late teens sat across the aisle, laughing and speaking animatedly about something. The silky black ponytail of the girl in the middle swung back and forth as she looked at each of her companions in turn. Lesley couldn’t hear what they were saying, couldn’t even tell if they were speaking English, but she envied their exuberance. They looked so carefree. Lesley felt like her life was being swept along toward a train wreck by events that were completely beyond her control.
She glanced to her left at her mom. The two of them were on their way downtown for some lunch and a bit of mother-daughter time.
Lesley thought her mother looked small and vulnerable. Her face was drawn and pale with dark circles under her eyes.
“You sure got me thinking yesterday,” Rose said.
“I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings.”
Rose shook her head.
“You didn’t. It just felt like unfinished business. That’s why I called in sick today and drove back here.”
A resolute calm emanated from her that Lesley was not used to seeing.
“Not a day goes by,” Rose said, “that I don’t ask myself whether there was something I could have done differently with your father. He used to promise to give up the gambling, but money kept disappearing from our bank account. Sometimes I said nothing. Other times I waved the account statement in his face and we’d fight about it. He always ended up promising it would never happen again. But of course it did.”
“Mom, you don’t have to go into all this.”
“I know, but …” Rose sighed. “You know what the worst part was?”
“What?”
“Seeing what your father’s death did to you. It was hard on Michael, too, but you disappeared inside a shell for the first year or so. That was the main reason we moved to Worcester. Your therapist said a change might do you good, and it did to some extent. But even after you got back to being yourself there was still this … I don’t know, this distance between us.”
Lesley thought her mother’s hand trembled as Rose rubbed her own cheek, but then again, the train made everything tremble.
“You and I used to do all sorts of things together before your father died,” Rose said. “You liked me to read to you at bedtime. We played duets on the piano, even after you stopped taking lessons. And every day at dinnertime you told me what happened to you at school. I knew about every boy you had a crush on. But all that went away when your father died. You wouldn’t let me back in. I kept telling myself that if I gave you some space it would work itself out, that things would gradually get back to normal. But after a while the distance got to be normal. And then you went away to college and …” She shrugged.
“I spent a lot of time blaming Bruce,” Rose went on, “asking how he could have done this to us. There were times I think I would have strangled him if he had shown up again.”
Rose stared up in the general direction of the advertisements that lined the top of the wall opposite them. “But mostly I kept trying to figure out what I had done wrong.”
“Me too,” Lesley said.
The words were out before Lesley knew they were coming.
Small lines of concern formed between Rose’s eyebrows.
“What do you mean?” Rose said.
“I always thought he must have been really sad to do what he did,” Lesley said. She clamped her hands between her knees. “And I wondered if I was part of the reason he was unhappy.”
A look of horror spread on Rose’s face.
“That’s not true. Your father loved you more than anything.”
“You don’t remember him yelling at me? How I wanted to stay out late with my friends and he didn’t want me to?”
“You were fourteen years old. Everybody tests their limits at that age.”
“Still, it was a problem for Dad.”
“Any problems he had were his, not yours.”
“I remember what he told me after he was arrested,” Lesley said. “He said none of the charges were true. ‘I didn’t do anything, Lesley.’ That’s what he kept telling me. Then he’d say, ‘You believe me, don’t you?’ Of course I believed him. In my eyes he was big and strong and perfect. He could have told me the sun was made of melted butter and I would have believed him.”
Lesley felt the familiar sting behind her eyes, the hurt inside trying to come out into the sunshine, to make itself real and painful. She blinked the feeling away.
“How could he do that, Mom? How could he love me and at the same time look me right in the eye and lie to me?”
“I don’t know, except we all have our weaknesses and your father certainly had his share.”
Lesley grimaced. “And now I have to figure out if Rob is lying to me.”
Rose nodded thoughtfully. “I’m sorry you two are having troubles. I always liked Rob.”
“Until now.”
“No, that’s not really true.”
“You said I’d be better off without him.”
“So I’m an overprotective mother, but something occurred to me last night when I was driving home. Despite all the problems your Dad and I had, not once did I ever consider leaving him. All I wanted to do was help him, to work it out. So who am I to suggest you should abandon Rob now.”
“But it was different for you. There were lots of reasons to stay. You were married, with kids.”
“And you don’t have reasons for being with Rob?”
Lesley braced herself with her feet as the train slowed for a station stop.
“I thought I did.”
“And now?”
“It’s hard to trust him,” Lesley said. “I mean, the way he’s acting. Like last night. We were apart, what — eight, ten hours? He ends up running to Kirsten Glanville’s place and spending the night with her.”
Rose lifted both eyebrows, but said nothing as the train doors opened. A few new passengers boarded and found seats.
“Then this morning,” Lesley said, “Rob phoned and tried to convince me Tim must have sabotaged the bank’s computers. As far as I can tell, all Tim has done is try to make me feel better.”
“Does all this mean you and Rob are through?”
Lesley sighed.
“I don’t know. One minute it feels that way and the next minute I want to grab him and hold on tight and to hell with the rest of the world.”